The great foreclosure folly

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has released an ebook based on testimony from whistleblowers at Bank of America and PNC on the whitewash more formally known as the Independent Foreclosure Reviews. You can download the pdf here.

Read more about the book here.

What a deal

The fiscal cliff deal was a “crony capitalist blowout,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. Bill Moyers explains why:

Source: http://billmoyers.com/segment/bill-moyers-essay-the-crony-capitalist-blowout/.

Offshore Loot: The (Really) Big Picture

A trillion here, a trillion there… pretty soon you’re talking real money. The London Observer reports new estimates of the world’s offshore wealth:

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

Read more here.

Corporate Corruption: The Spreading Scourge

Speaking of bringing bad things to life, Eduardo Porter writes in the business section of The New York Times:

Company executives are paid to maximize profits, not to behave ethically. Evidence suggests that they behave as corruptly as they can, within whatever constraints are imposed by law and reputation….

And the furious rush of corporate cash into the political process — which differs from bribery in that companies pay politicians to change laws rather than bureaucrats to ignore them — is unlikely to foment ethical behavior.

Read the story here.

Too-big-to-fail banks: Heads they win, tails we lose

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone dissect the corrupt nexus between our financial system and our political system:

Source: http://billmoyers.com/segment/matt-taibbi-and-yves-smith-on-the-follies-of-big-banks-and-government/